Apple address slow MacBook Pro SATA with firmware update

Apple have released a firmware update for their latest MacBook Pro notebooks that fully enables their SATA 3.0 Gbps interface. The move comes in response to vocal complaints from MacBook Pro 13- and 15-inch buyers who discovered Apple had seemingly limited their new unibody machines to the older 1.5 Gbps SATA. However the company has distanced itself from drives that actually use the faster interface, reminding users that "Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported."

According to users, only those who had ordered the factory-fit SSD option had the faster SATA-II enabled. Those with traditional hard-drives would not have noticed issues with the reduced transfer rate, but had they chosen to upgrade to an SSD at a later date the 1.5 Gbps interface could have presented a bottleneck.

The update itself, "MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7", is a 3.35MB download and requires that the user is running Mac OS X 10.5.7. The company has made no comment on why it chose to limit the new notebooks to the older SATA version.